Voting Law Proposals and Voting Rights Efforts (2 Viewers)

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    MT15

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    This is, IMO, going to be a big topic in the coming year. Republicans have stated their aim to make voting more restrictive in just about every state where they have the means to do so. Democrats would like to pass the Voting Rights Bill named after John Lewis. I’m going to go look up the map of all the states which have pending legislation to restrict voting. Now that we have the election in the rear view, I thought we could try to make this a general discussion thread, where people who have concerns about voting abuses can post as well and we can discuss it from both sides. Please keep memes out of this thread and put them in the boards where we go to talk about the other side, lol.
     
    That's just messed up. The registar's office should have a staff who vets these challenges before anyone has to attend any hearings. They should have the ability of weeding out invalid challenges, i.e. the challenged voter has already been vetted or the registration is in order and correct so that they're not wasting time dealing with unjustified challenges.

    And challenges do need to be limited. For anyone submitting more than a handful of challenges, if the challenges are found to be invalid, the challengers can lose their challenge privileges.
    I think it's probably working exactly as intended.
     
    That's just messed up. The registar's office should have a staff who vets these challenges before anyone has to attend any hearings. They should have the ability of weeding out invalid challenges, i.e. the challenged voter has already been vetted or the registration is in order and correct so that they're not wasting time dealing with unjustified challenges.

    And challenges do need to be limited. For anyone submitting more than a handful of challenges, if the challenges are found to be invalid, the challengers can lose their challenge privileges.
    Oh, I’m not sure, but I think that staff did try to seek out invalid challenges. But there were still plenty of people who had to go to hearings. They couldn’t possibly have had 100,000 hearings and get them done in a reasonable time frame. Totally with you - people should lose the ability to challenge when they are just trying to cause havoc like those half dozen people who did this.
     
    You think 6 people submitting 100k challenges should be considered working as intended?
    Yes, exactly as intended. It was never about voter fraud, it was always about voter suppression. And that's exactly what this is doing -- suppressing votes by making it costly and time consuming for certain people to participate in the voting process. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
     
    Yes, exactly as intended. It was never about voter fraud, it was always about voter suppression. And that's exactly what this is doing -- suppressing votes by making it costly and time consuming for certain people to participate in the voting process. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
    Oh, lol. I missed the sarcasm there. Just baffling that Republicans have no shame.

    Well, how about 10 Democrats putting their heads together and evening things out a bit? What's good for the goose and all that.
     
    Speaking of working as intended
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    Florida Republicans have hit dozens of voter registration groups with thousands of dollars of fines, the latest salvo in an alarming crackdown on voting in the state led by Governor Ron DeSantis.

    At least 26 groups have cumulatively racked up more than $100,000 in fines since September of last year, according to a list that was provided by Florida officials to the Guardian. The groups include both for-profit and nonprofit organizations as well as political parties, including the statewide Republican and Democratic parties of Florida.

    The fines, which range from $50 to tens of thousands of dollars, were levied by the state’s office of election crimes and security, a first-of-its-kind agency created at the behest of DeSantis in 2022 to investigate voter fraud. Voter fraud is extremely rare, and the office has already come under scrutiny for bringing criminal charges against people who appeared to be confused about their voting eligibility.

    Election watchdogs worry the new policies could have a chilling effect on engaging voters. There has already been a drop in voter registrations this year compared with 2019 – the last full year leading into a presidential election, according to Daniel Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida.

    Through 1 June of this year, 2,430 new registrations had come from third-party voter registration organizations, he said. That’s on pace to be a sharp decrease from the 63,212 new voter registrations third-party groups submitted by the end of 2019.

    A crackdown on third-party voter registration groups is also likely to disproportionately affect Floridians of color, who are about five times more likely to register with third-party groups than white voters are.…..

     
    Last edited:
    Speaking of working as intended
    ========================
    Florida Republicans have hit dozens of voter registration groups with thousands of dollars of fines, the latest salvo in an alarming crackdown on voting in the state led by Governor Ron DeSantis.

    At least 26 groups have cumulatively racked up more than $100,000 in fines since September of last year, according to a list that was provided by Florida officials to the Guardian. The groups include both for-profit and nonprofit organizations as well as political parties, including the statewide Republican and Democratic parties of Florida.

    The fines, which range from $50 to tens of thousands of dollars, were levied by the state’s office of election crimes and security, a first-of-its-kind agency created at the behest of DeSantis in 2022 to investigate voter fraud. Voter fraud is extremely rare, and the office has already come under scrutiny for bringing criminal charges against people who appeared to be confused about their voting eligibility.

    Election watchdogs worry the new policies could have a chilling effect on engaging voters. There has already been a drop in voter registrations this year compared with 2019 – the last full year leading into a presidential election, according to Daniel Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida.

    Through 1 June of this year, 2,430 new registrations had come from third-party voter registration organizations, he said. That’s on pace to be a sharp decrease from the 63,212 new voter registrations third-party groups submitted by the end of 2019.…….

    Smh. Florida...yeah.
     
    A recent Mississippi law that allows the state to appoint judges and prosecutors in Hinds county, including the majority-Black capital of Jackson, constituted a “crude scheme that singles out and discriminates against Black residents”, the justice department said on Wednesday.

    The agency announced its intent to intervene in a lawsuit filed by the NAACP against the state, arguing that the law, signed by the Republican governor, Tate Reeves, in April, took voting authority away from Black residents in Jackson and Hinds county, which are both Democrat-run and majority-Black.

    “This thinly veiled state takeover is intended to strip power, voice and resources away from Hinds county’s predominantly-Black electorate, singling out the majority-Black Hinds county for adverse treatment imposed on no other voters in the state of Mississippi,” Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general of the justice department’s civil rights division, said in a statement.……

     
    Oh, lol. I missed the sarcasm there. Just baffling that Republicans have no shame.

    Well, how about 10 Democrats putting their heads together and evening things out a bit? What's good for the goose and all that.
    They did win a small battle in NY State - the courts overturned the NY districts, which could turn over the House, all by itself.
     
    On 22 November 2020, Heider Garcia, the elections administrator for Tarrant county, Texas, was awake in his living room until around 3am, unable to sleep over fears that a stranger might show up at his house, he recalled.

    An account had posted his family’s home address on Twitter during weeks of false conspiracy theories and death threats about his role in the 2020 election.

    Donald Trump’s supporters refused to believe that Tarrant county, a major, diverse county that encompasses the cities of Fort Worth and Arlington, had broken its Republican voting patterns for Joe Biden.

    Garcia spent Thanksgiving break installing security cameras – but he didn’t quit his job or stay quiet in the wake of the threats. Rather, as he detailed in his 2022 Senate testimony, his office devoted the next 18 months to championing transparency, from releasing public records to speaking with skeptics.

    Garcia “has an open door, he would answer the phone, and he would walk people through the process”, said Paul Gronke, a political science professor at Reed College and the director of the elections and voting information center. “A lot of election officials are not willing to be as open and transparent as that.”

    But after weathering attacks from the outside, Garcia was driven to quit in April by events closer to home. His resignation letter alluded to differences with a Republican county judge who has catered to election deniers. The judge helped set up a taskforce focused on investigating and prosecuting election crimes, which critics view as doing little but feeding the anxious climate around elections.

    Across the US, conservative officials who entertain Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election have raised alarms about voter fraud, despite a dearth of evidence that it’s a problem. Some election skeptics have sought positions that influence how local elections are run, persisting even as their attempts to win and interfere with elections have mostly failed.

    Tarrant county exemplifies the fallout of this movement in one of the most populous counties in the country. Democrats have asked the US justice department to intervene to protect voters of color in Tarrant county from intimidation. The county judge has dismissed their concerns as “partisan” and “pathetic”.

    After Garcia resigned, the hiring process to replace him included a candidate who, as an election “integrity” activist, went to a voter’s home to deliver a letter questioning their choice of polling place.

    Garcia declined to comment on his resignation. But he said that politicians who focus on election integrity like to play the hero, and it will continue as long as they are rewarded for it. “There is absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing anywhere,” he said. “Yet it seems that there’s still a quest to find a villain.”…….

     
    Alabama GOP releases a second map, that also doesn’t follow the directive from SCOTUS. They are going to run out the clock and then go with their original illegal map, which is exactly what the Ohio GOP did (IIRC).

     

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